Sorry that I haven’t been able to post for a while. I have been on the road and extremely busy with work lately. This week will be the same, so posts will continue to be light. Please bear with me.

While I was away, I received a design submission from Jacob Feldman. Jacob developed this concept bicycle while he was a student at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden. Nice work Jacob; thank you for sharing the concept.

Following is an explanation of the design in Jacob’s own words:

The shape of the bicycle is based on an idea to make a bicycle frame that looks like one solid part instead of having a lot of parts that are welded together. I tried to keep the “feel” of a traditional bicycle but at the same time creating something new. By almost keeping the basic outline of the “double triangle” frame I feel that the frame is still pursued as a bicycle as we know it, which is important for the segment of city racers. At the same the frame has its own expression. I worked a lot with the overall expression of the bicycle trying to make it feel flexible and fast in the city context.

The concept is made for people who care about their bike a bit more than the usual day-to-day biker, they live in the city and value the bikes speed and it’s light weight.

I worked together with a small Swedish brand called G2 to make the concept more real. Therefore I have incorporated G2s values into the frame and made it suit their target groups

I made a full-scale model to visualize the project and give it a more “real” feeling. .

Strada was my bachelor project in industrial design at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden 2006.Any questions or comments are gladly received at my mail: jacob.feldman@konstfack.se

Philip: In my project i had contact with different “bike builders” that confirmed that taking away the seat tube is possible, there are already bikes out on the market with similar solutions. If it were to be taken further than a concept there would be prototypes, tests and adjustments to make sure that it doesn´t flex lika a noodle…..

Bicycles for me are difficult to do as styling exercises. I claasify this one as that. The hard corners are not what carbon wants to do gracefully. The lack of a seat tube has been done and one can engineer around it but what is the gain? In this case in real use with no cage to “guide” the chain at the top of the chainring means a dropped chain, been there and had it happen, just a rough road section away.

From a distance it is handsome, but it is hard to flout sound engineering on a bike, everything is so exposed.

I do not think the “upright” bike is in its perfect form either, thank the UCI for the design restrictions we endure.

To answer the question on how it stops nad where the cables are: This was only a ten week project wich had to include not only the building of the model but several stages of scetching and research. If I would have had more time I would have built a second frame with the fittings for the essential brakecalipers……

I also have to say that my goal with the project isn´t to improve the “”double triangle” frame it is more about trying to find a new way to percieve it and make it stand out, as a concept…